Even the Tree Has Been Downsized, but the Season Can Still Bring Hope

Scott Olivieri at Michael & Sons garden center in Greenburgh, N.Y., says many people are buying smaller trees.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

GREENBURGH, N.Y.

We drove over to what we thought of as the Last Toy Store, a dilapidated frame building on Central Avenue in White Plains crammed with model battleships and tiny containers of Testors acrylic paints, Nitro Mini-Launch toy rockets, radio-controlled airplanes, Eagle balsa wood gliders — stuff kids actually did with their very own hands. But it was gone, its block now made up of faceless new office buildings and apartments with great big for-lease signs out front.

Over at Michael & Sons garden center in Greenburgh, the Friday snow covered the Fraser and balsam firs in a regal seasonal coating. But there’s a Christmas recession, too, so Scott Olivieri, whose father started the business in 1961 at its other location — in Elmsford — said sales were nothing to write home about.

“People have to get a tree, I guess, but they’re not getting the whole package, wreath, poinsettia, the whole deal,” he said. “They’re downsizing the tree. If they got an eight-foot last year, maybe they do the six this year. The Frasers are more expensive than the balsams, so it looks like a lot of people are leaning toward the balsams. We’re even way down in funeral wreaths people take to the cemetery this time of year. Maybe they’re just doing it a little later.”

OUTSIDE, Kevin Jaeger was picking through the balsams. At least, he’s in a good field — he works for DeerTech, which helps harried homeowners protect their helpless plants from ravenous deer. If stock prices had the same growth rate as suburban deer, Bernard L. Madoff would still be signing up new victims.

“Oh, no way,” he said. “I’ve been watching this since the 1980s. This is coming apart at the seams, and we’ve got to rebuild it again from scratch. Nothing in that stimulus package can make much of a difference; you can’t reboot this back to life. This patient is dead on the table.”

Not many of us can remember Christmas in 1929 or Christmas in 1933 or Christmas in 1941. But this isn’t the first dour holiday season, and isn’t likely to be the last.

Elizabeth Lesser, a founder of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, in Rhinebeck, is the author of “Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow” (Villard Books, 2004). She figures that these difficult times can do that, too.

She said a bunch of her friends, it turned out, had pooled all their money with a guy she had never heard of named Madoff, and they now have nothing. So she doesn’t want to sound like a Pollyanna.

But it is no longer a wispy New Age thought that there has to be more to life than the toxic culture of money and excess that gave such absurd rewards to the financial wizards and functionaries whose contribution to the public good was so minimal.

So, she says, it can’t be all bad to witness the downfall of an era that expressed so much that’s wrong about the way we’ve lived and the things we value. “It’s like we’ve been in a collective trance for however-many years, trying to live a lifestyle that’s unsustainable, that’s not satisfying spiritually, emotionally, that depends on so much consumption, working long, insane hours under such stress,” she said.

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She added: “It wasn’t making us all that happy anyway. I hear from people all the time saying, ‘We’re not going to do Christmas or Hanukkah like we have in the past,’ and then they whisper, ‘And you know what? It’s such a relief.’ I think people are wise enough to know something had to give and when you break open something that’s not working it can lead to our better selves.”

Of course, for now it just looks to many people that they’ll be working those endless hours under more stress just to keep their heads above water.

Still, even in the tiny world that plays out twice a week in this column, it’s hard to miss how hard so many people work to do the right thing — and how they’re usually rewarded, if not with multimillion-dollar Wall Street bonuses.

So Lucy Mercado, trying to keep alive her hand-to-mouth supply depot for soldiers in Iraq, got more help than she needed from generous readers last week and will be sending out her gift bags to 270 or so soldiers in four platoons.

At the Starbucks in Nyack they raised $800 for a proper funeral for their friend Fleming, the homeless man in their midst who died just before Thanksgiving.

Chris Pendergast on Long Island, who should have long since died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, rode a motorized wheelchair from Montauk to Manhattan as he has every year since 2001.

Very small stuff in the grand scheme of things, but maybe stuff that wouldn’t seem small if we had our eye on what matters.

There won’t be any “It’s a Wonderful Life” finishes to this version of “It’s a Miserable Year.”

But, like a reprise of pre-global-warming winters, there was something breathtaking in that celestial blanket of snow on Friday night, and if the Christmas lights, red, blue and green, glowing above those pristine white vistas ever looked more dazzling, it’s hard to remember when.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A45 of the New York edition with the headline: Even Trees Have Been Downsized, But Season Can Still Bring Hope. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe